


where the strength has gone

by whasupwhereitis



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-05-15 00:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whasupwhereitis/pseuds/whasupwhereitis
Summary: Those that knew Michael's mobile number were few, especially as it wasn't so much a 'mobile' as it was a conduit through space and dimension that existed solely because of Michael's sheer will and it wasn't so much a 'number' as it was that the dialer needed a strong enough and clear enough will to speak to Michael. Michael could count the amount of incoming calls she'd had over the span of her existence on one hand.And this time it's a demon in need of her help.





	1. Before the Fall

The heavenly upgraded mobile phone in Michael's pocket began to vibrate. To an outside observer the only indication that Michael felt the buzzbuzzbuzz in her pocket would have been the brief tap of her fingers against the table in front of her. No one was observing her though. Gabriel was so wrapped up in the sound of his own voice and the sheer glory of his own brilliance that Michael thought she could even whip the mobile out and answer it and he wouldn't notice.

Gabriel had been introduced to a projector, a particularly obtrusive model from the 1990's that clashed terribly with the aesthetic of heaven, at some point within the last one hundred years and was now showing Michael his detailed battle strategy for the upcoming Apocalypse with it. They were not terrible plans, Michael granted the other angel at least that much, but they relied too heavily on assumption. The largest assumption of all being that no matter what, no matter what the demons in the basement might do, that the side of heaven would win. To voice such a thing as that would be to show doubt. Doubt in the Great Plan and doubt in God. Michael knew well how doubt was dealt with and so Michael remained silent.

The demons were not the mindless and ridiculous bunch that Gabriel so often accused them of being. They had fought them before the Fall. They had called them brethren...before the Fall. Gabriel had fought them and Michael marveled at how quickly he had forgotten their strength. It was long ago now, but Michael could close her eyes and still see it. She could remember every battle. Such a bitter and terrible war that ended with so many gone forever and even more evicted from heaven. Michael's victory as God's general had been costly.

The mobile stopped buzzing for all of thirty seconds before it went off again.

Those that knew the mobile number were few, especially as it wasn't so much a 'mobile' as it was a conduit through space and dimension that existed solely because of Michael's sheer will and it wasn't so much a 'number' as it was that the dialer needed a strong enough and clear enough will to speak to Michael. Michael could count the amount of incoming calls she'd had over the span of her existence on one hand.

"Gabriel," she interrupted.

"Hm?" he responded and did not look up from where he was attempting to draw the terrain of the fields of Megiddo.

"I have an appointment with...the cherubs."

"Oh, yes, of course," Gabriel looked up at her with a haughty smile. Everything about him oozed such arrogance and had done so since the moment of his creation. Those violet eyes of his were already looking right through her. "We'll pick this back up when you can focus a bit more."

"Right."

Michael was able to hold off her eye roll until she turned her back on Michael and walked four steps away. She found some privacy in the closest stairwell.

"This is Michael," she answered.

As it was not truly a 'mobile', but a conduit through space and dimension, it brought more to Michael then merely sound. It brought the smell of hell, which smells of sulfur and rot. It brought the feeling of suffering and clawing and cloying desperation. It brought the sound of dripping pipes and sinners screams and the cackles of demons and even somewhere down there was the faint sound of someone strumming a guitar.

"Who am I speaking to?" Michael demanded as her nose wrinkled up in distaste.

"It's Dagon."

Michael blinked. She licked her lips and blinked again. "What do you want?" The strumming in the background, somewhere deep in hell, turned into the chords for Yesterday. They really did have all of humanities best musicians down there, Michael thought resentfully. After several long moments of Dagon's silence Michael huffed. "I said, what do you want?" Michael spat.

"Someone summoned Beelzebub," Dagon finally said.

Michael could hear the tension in her voice and it gave her some pause. Dagon had been an incredible warrior, brave and courageous, who served Michael well…before the war. Before the Fall. She was not the type to panic without reason. "What of it?" Michael asked.

"It was a trick. They're demon hunters. American."

"American. That's a bad stroke of luck there." Michael nodded curtly at a passing angel and waited for them to stroll down the stairs before she continued. "I don't quite understand why you're involving me in your drama though." Michael scoffed and shook her head. What Beelzebub did to these demon hunters was no business of Michael's. Although the knowledge that Beelzebub had been lured in by some lowly human trick gave Michael sick delight. A mighty Prince of Hell. Right hand to Lucifer himself. Tricked by humans. How the mighty truly do Fall.

A sense of Dagon herself came through the mobile. Dagon, with her silver scales and pointed teeth. Dagon, with her eyebrows pinched together as she huddled in the corner of a dark and moldy room. Michael could smell demon blood through the mobile. A stirring of compassion surprised Michael. "Why are you calling me?" Michael asked and tried to tone down the hostility in her voice, she wasn’t very successful, but she did try.

"She can't escape on her own and I can't go to her. I’ve tried."

Michael scoffed audibly. "Beelzebub? Needs my help? Now this is the trick."

"They're on holy ground."

“You can walk on holy ground, if you move fast enough.”

“I said I tried!” Dagon snarled. “The moment she left I followed and I was crippled as soon as I appeared. I lost my legs below the knees and barely escaped.”

Michael was silent at that. The speed needed for that kind of strike...she would have said a human wouldn’t be capable of it.

“They have her in blessed chains,” Dagon continued. “They've nailed an iron crucifix to her sternum and driven iron stakes through her palms.”

While the imagery certainly was horrific, Michael still did not feel the acute need to jump to the rescue. She somewhat thought that Beelzebub could make it out of all that on her own, but something felt off. It felt Wrong.

The sudden hesitant silence from Dagon would have been enough to make Michael's heart race, if she had been in a corporeal form at the moment. “Is that all?” Michael prompted.

"They have Holy water. They say they will douse her at dawn."

Michael was stunned into silence at that. She worked her jaw and flexed her hand around the bannister. "Where did they get Holy water?" she asked. "How are you aware of this? Hm? Do you have a hostage negotiation team I've not been aware of?"

Dagon hissed down into the connection. "Holy water comes from one place. So one of your kind is giving humans weapons they have no idea the magnitude of. Imagine if they poured that Holy water into the fucking ocean, Michael. This is just as much a matter of your security as it is anything else. Go to that place, find out who their source is, and free Beelzebub."

"As if I'd rescue a demon," Michael snarled. "Holy water is just what she deserves. It's what you all deserve. You're traitorous sc-"

"But you were," Dagon hesitated. The limits of speech as humans would describe it seemed to befuddle her for a moment. "You were friends," she said simply.

Michael flinched like she'd been struck and was filled with rage and malice the likes of which she hadn't felt since…since God displayed her displeasure in fire and brimstone and floods. Michael shook her head and trilled out a sound she couldn't contain as she battled all the emotion down. "That was before," Michael said just as simply. Before the war. Before the Fall.

She hung up.

__________________

The Holy water is what eventually forced her hand. Holy water in the hands of humans. It was so absurd it was laughable, but the mere idea that one of her forces, an angel under her nose, had given it to a human needed to be investigated- no matter how implausible. It was the Holy water that forced her hand.

Angels, like humans, could lie to themselves exceptionally well.

Michael stood before the floating globe of Earth in an immense white room and closed her eyes and let her Being, her Essence, her tendrils of awareness seep out over the continents and seas. Finding Beelzebub was not as hard as Michael had imagined it would be. Tracking a demon should not be so easy, even an incapacitated one.

She was in America, in an abandoned church in a nearly abandoned town.

It was…as Dagon had described.

Hearing of it was one thing, but it was entirely another to witness the tortures inflicted upon Beelzebub. Her corporeal form was that of a small statured woman, which Michael had never particularly thought of as fragile before now. They had stripped her. Hosed her down. Nailed that crucifix to her chest. Shackled her. Hammered iron spikes through her palms and into the floor. They had gouged out her eyes. The Holy ground had burned every inch of her it touched. When the Great War was upon angels and demons such things as this would not be sanctioned under Michael's command. Such cruelty was beneath her. It was beneath any angel.

But to do all this, Michael thought, they must first have had to incapacitate her in a way that Michael couldn't even comprehend. Beelzebub was as strong as Michael, and as strong as Gabriel, some even said as strong as Lucifer himself. How well Michael remembered the power Beelzebub wielded.

Michael observed the abandoned church in which Beelzebub was held with a critical eye. There was the Holy water, shining brightly upon the dilapidated Eucharist, held in a thermos that showed the logo for a local auto repair shop on its front. A classless way to carry such a mighty thing.

There were eight human men in the church. Humans, Michael seethed, these so called demon hunters wearing baseball caps and flannel.

"How did you do it?" Michael mused to herself as she looked down upon the Earth. She tapped a finger against her closed lips. “How, how, how,” she murmured.

Michael waited for only a while longer, as she observed the men and the church and Beelzebub. Beelzebub, who remained stoically and frighteningly quiet throughout that time. The men came and screamed at her of her sin, they branded her with symbols of the Lord and demanded that she beg forgiveness. As if it were the place of human men to punish a demon. Michael seethed at the mere idea. The men kicked and stomped on Beelzebub until bones snapped. They spit on her.

“Why don’t you fight?” Michael barked and turned away from the globe in disgust, only to turn back a second later. Michael balled her hands into fists before exhaling a long breath. She uncleched her hands and instead smoothed down the front of her suit jacket.

_____________________

"Beelzebub," Michael whispered and knelt next to the demon sprawled and chained to the floor. The stink of burned flesh and hair had Michael irritable. With a wave of Michael's hand the chains that held Beelzebub down and the iron spikes through her hands were gone. "Sit up now."

Beelzebub groaned. It was the first sound Michael had heard her make since she had first been able to track her. "What are you doing here?" Beelzebub croaked, but she did not move.

"I said sit up!" Michael snapped and hauled at the meat of Beelzebub's bicep until the demon was draped across Michael rather than the floor. All skin, her whole front and half of her face, that rested against the floor was burned black. "What did they do to you?" Michael hissed as she dug her fingernails under the crucifix and tore it out from Beelzebub's chest and placed it down next to them.

Michael grabbed a fistful of Beelzebub's black hair at the base of her neck and forced her head up. Michael gasped and the horror she felt wash over her froze her for a second. She stuttered back into motion and gently placed her forehead against the demons. Michael now saw the full ruin of Beelzebub's eyes. A demon, or an angel even also, were not just their corporeal forms, they went Beyond what one could see and touch and smell. So it was not just the physical ruin of Beelzebub's eyes that forced Michael to such shock. "What did they use? How did they do this?!" These human men, lowly humans, below angels and demons, had taken Beelzebub's Sight. They had ripped into her very being, her being Beyond what mortals were meant to touch or see, and ripped out her Sight. One can regrow skin, one can mend bones, one can regrow eyes, but Sight...

“Get up,” Michael urged and stood and hauled and dragged at Beelzebub’s naked and limp form. “Get up, I said!” Her plan had been to heal what she could of the demon and then overpower the humans and learn of which angel gave them the Holy water. All that had happened before, all that she knew, should have told Michael to heed more carefully before now, but Gabriel was not the only angel afflicted with too much pride.

Now, she would change her plan. She would retreat with the demon. She would observe the humans more carefully. She would return with greater numbers.

Beelzebub found the strength in her legs to stand upon her ruined feet. One hand clutched at Michael’s arm. The blood of Beelzebub’s corporeal form was warm and tacky against Michael’s skin. It stained her clothes. Michael wrapped an arm around Beelzebub’s waist and tutted out a soothing sound. “We’re going. I have you.”

When Michael tried to leave, when she tried to simply disappear, as angels and demons have the ability to do, she very suddenly found her whole body rigidly frozen and unmovable.

A laugh carried through the air around the angel and the demon. “Now, now, a guest doesn’t just leave without goodbyes. Do they?”


	2. A Thousand Eyes

Michael huffed out a forceful breath through her nose, it was the only outward sign of aggression she could manage at the moment. Her eyes flicked across the room quickly and methodically. Five of the eight men who had captured Beelzebub entered from two of the three exits. The man furthest from Michael favored his right leg- a possible childhood injury. The man next to him had fear in his eyes and hesitancy in every step. With the unnatural speed of celestial being and the thought process of a fighter she cataloged the possible weaknesses in all the men with one glance.

The man in the lead clapped his hands together. He was elderly for a human and Michael could smell the metal holding his hips together. "But a guest doesn't just arrive and not introduce themselves, do they? Speak your name, demon!"

Michael grunted as a pulling sensation yanked at her throat and an urge she couldn't control almost had her calling out her name, but she was no demon and the mere assumption of such gave her the strength to remain silent. Whatever power these humans had stumbled upon was incredible. How, how, how, Michael mused and locked eyes with the old man.

He had blue eyes in a wrinkled face. Michael could See his blood pumping through his weak heart. She could see his See his excitement and glee. She could see that he felt powerful. Michael observed this all with calculating curiosity. 

The old man clapped again and took a step closer. "Speak your name, demon!"

Michael’s gaze turned to a glare as she steadfastly remained silent. Angels and demons are very similar in many ways, as once they had been kin, but whatever power these humans had stumbled upon was not meant for the likes of Michael and could not force her to speak. The very entity of her being rebelled against the invisible bonds around her, and they were weakening fast. Michael did not fear these human men or whatever power they held, but then she felt Beelzebub, who had found the strength to stand on ruined feet, beginning to slacken against her side. It was not Michael alone in this situation and Michael, alone in her thoughts, admitted she was afraid of what could be done to the demon in her grasp.

"Why won't she speak, Samuel?" one of the men asked. "Any demon-"

"Be quiet!” the old man hissed. The anger and the building embarrassment made the old man’s blood grow hot, Michael could See every emotion inside him. He was laughably transparent, even compared to most humans.

He limped forward. Even old and infirm he was taller than Michael, not that such a thing as physical size mattered at all when it pertained to angels. “I said, speak your name, demon!” he screamed in Michael’s face. Spit flew from his mouth and landed against her cheek.

Michael wished she could sweep forward and rip him apart. The urge to spill his blood across the floor for his insolence was nauseatingly powerful. It had been so long since she'd been unleashed upon humanity for their sins. Soon, she thought, so soon. But something…else was in him. Some shifting and ever moving thing that Michael sensed but could not See.

She remained silent.

The old man did not turn his eyes away from Michael as he spoke next. "Prince of Demons!" he called. "Hear me and heed me, tell me your cohort's name!"

Beelzebub jolted at the command and the motion had her dislodging from Michael's grip. She slid to the floor and her already blackened skin began to sizzle. She let out one scream of incomprehensible sound and writhed at Michael’s feet.

"No!" Michael barked without intending to.

"So you can speak," the man had the gall to smile.

Michael smiled in return, a baring of teeth that had the hesitant man at the back of the group taking a half step back. "I am merciful," Michael said as easy as a cool breeze. "If you release us, I will spare you your life." It was not true, of course. Mercy was a gift Michael had never gotten the hang of.

The men laughed after an uneasy moment and Michael could have laughed with them, if she'd been able. A human would not know what was best for them. A human could not know the horrors she would unleash on them. She had expected too much of them. God’s favored children were just that, children, dumb and crawling in their own ruin.

“I command you to only speak your name, demon! Or else you will be silent!”

“I am no demon,” Michael spat. “You do not command me.”

A brief flicker of surprise filtered across the old man’s face and he finally stepped back from Michael before his indignation and ignorance overpowered him. "If you are no demon, why do you come for this one? Why do you come for the mighty," his smile turned mocking as he looked at how Beelzebub lay upon the floor, "Prince of Hell?"

“I am a power beyond your understanding.”

They laughed at her.

“You don’t look so powerful now,” the old man said with a condescending tilt of his head.

Michael smiled, that baring of teeth once more. She could feel the bonds that held her breaking. She could feel her power, so, so close. 

“You ask me my name, foolish one?” she could see him bristle at the insult, but spoke over his spluttered anger. "I am Archangel Michael. I am beyond your understanding. I am of heaven. Release me now."

The old man turned and shared looks with those behind him. When he turned back he did a look up and down Michael's corporeal form. "You aren't quite how we imagined you, but then, this Prince of Hell was not how we imagined them either." He took another step, and another. As he placed his hands clasped behind his back he began to circle the angel and demon. "If you are as you say, then you have defied the Lord."

Michael scoffed and rolled her eyes.

One of the men burst forward and backhanded her right across the face. She was still held immobile and so her head could not move with the blow at all. Her mouth filled with blood from the impact. She smiled then with her blood coated teeth and let the blood flow out her mouth and down her chin. She could feel it oozing down her neck and spreading across her frilly collar.

"You will show respect!" the man shouted, but stepped back when confronted with Michael’s calculating stare.

"No human is worthy of the respect of an angel," Michael spat back. Michael could feel her power, so close. It tingled and ran across her entire corporeal form. She could feel it in the air. Whatever thing they had found to incapacitate and hold Beelzebub was not meant for the likes of an angel. Her anger had always made her more powerful. Little cracks were forming. She could wiggle her toes now.

"You have defied the Lord!" the old man screamed. He'd come around the angel and demon and now found himself face to face with Michael once more.

"You do not tell me of the will of God." Michael said. She twitched her fingers. The hesitant man at the back of the group looked confusedly down at her hand while turning his head like a quizzical dog.

The old man chuckled. The aging flesh dangling from his neck jiggled and Michael stared at it. She would rip him apart. She would rip his throat out.

"We are his chosen." The old man said. "He spoke to me and told me this."

That God would speak to a human? It was laughable. It was ridiculous. It was rage inducing. God spoke to no one. If God does not speak to angels, then she does not speak to humans. Spoiled, bratty humans. How Michael hated them.

"You speak lies," Michael hissed. "God speaks to no one. You are nothing. You live and die as nothing! Your souls are nothing more than bargaining chips."

He turned to speak to the human men. His blasphemy and his clear dismissal of Michael filled her with the kind of rage that thrummed through her entire sprawling being. A human, turning their back on her. She had never known such disrespect. Gone were the days of old when her arrivals were heralded and feared and revered, gone were the days when she carried out the will of God. Gone were the days that Michael even knew the will of her dearly loved God. Deep down, so deep and dark and repressed, the thought that had been brewing for thousands of years erupted in a spewing of rage. Why didn’t God speak?

The old man and Michael were both surprised to find her raising her hand, quick like anything, to turn him roughly by the shoulder and grasp him around the throat. Her grip was tight. She snarled in his face and dragged him closer. "I offered you mercy, but you threw it aside. You are a foolish and weak man of flesh and the fury I will rain down on you is of your own making." She did not say this as much as she pushed the words into his skull. 

His men hesitated to approach as Michael lifted the old man into the air. Having the words of an angel pushed into your brain was not a pleasant experience, as their essence was a fiery and unknowable thing to a human. Michael watched impassively as blood poured from the old man's eyes and ears and nose. Thick blood. Life blood. He kicked and clawed at her, but more and more of her power was rushing back. The rush of it made her feel...alive in a way that was exhilarating. Her wings unfurled behind her without thought. They spread wide and up. To human eyes they were feathers that matched the chestnut of Michael’s hair, but human eyes saw everything through a filter limited by their ignorance. Michael’s wings were so much more than feathers. They were fire. They were destruction. They were a thousand eyes with which to See.

The building rumbled around them. Its old frame groaned as a wind howled outside and what had been a rather pretty evening turned into black and thundering clouds in an instant. The stained glass windows all around the abandoned church shattered at once and doors slammed shut. It had been so long, so long, since Michael had been unleashed. The urge to destroy was strong. The urge to kill was strong. Michael was a warrior, but not in the same way that humans are sometimes warriors. Michael was created as a whole being, sprung from nothing by God's very grace. She had not needed to grow or learn. She was made as she was meant to be. She was made as God's strong sword, as her General, as her weapon. Thousands of years had passed and Michael had not been unleashed. But she was not some frothing animal, no matter how strong her rage was. She couldn't imagine the paperwork that would be waiting for her if she let her urges lead her.

As the old man began to weaken in Michael's grasp, her grip loosened.

She drew him closer and with her thousand eyes she observed him and ignored the pleas for mercy from the rest of the men. There was something inside the old man that did not belong. A Power he should not have. “Reveal to me,” Michael tore the order into his mind and with her grasp weakened he was able to draw in tortured breathes and scream with his eyes slammed shut. Michael pushed open his mind and tore it asunder looking for what was not human.

The touch of a demon was upon him. A powerful demon. So far down that if she hadn’t ripped him apart she would not have been able to find it. She dropped the twitching human with disgust. She’d walked into some sort of power struggle over Hell. Michael rolled her eyes and raised her hands. It took her considerable strength, but she tore the holiness from the ground.

Beelzebub coughed at her feet and extended one blackened hand towards Michael. She wrapped her grasp around Michael’s ankle and painfully dragged herself only a fraction closer.

With the cover of holiness gone Michael was able to See what lay beneath. Ancient demonic symbols, so ancient, from before the Fall, before there had been demonic and angelic really, had been built into the very essence of this place. It was why it had any power over Michael at all, once they had been so similar. This place had been built to be a trap since the day the concrete pad had been poured. With a bark of rage and with her arms and wings shaking with the effort, Michael burned away the demonic from the place. It was far more difficult than tearing away the holiness.

Michael staggered and fell down to the side on one knee with Beelzebub’s hand still around her ankle.

The buzzing started quietly, or a more accurate description would describe how the buzzing started as a vibration in the floor. A faint feeling that grew and grew until Michael’s whole body was shaking and she could feel the buzzing in the air. Michael reached out towards Beelzebub’s shoulder, but Beelzebub rose from the floor. That is not to say she placed weight upon her hands and knees and rose up. She simply flickered in and out of awareness. She had been on the floor and now she was standing upon the stripped earth with her blackened and burned skin flaking off to leave raw and exposed muscles.

The men were banging and pleading at one of the closed doors. Michael had willed the doors shut and so they remained shut. The old man was whimpering and trying to crawl.

Beelzebub shook as if she was having a seizure and opened her mouth wide. The rage and power in the scream that followed had Michael slamming her hands against her ears and wrapping herself in her own wings. The buzzing shook the world, the worst earthquake this region of the world would ever have. Miles and miles away in every direction buildings fell. People were dying.

Around Michael the building began to age, centuries in seconds, wood rotted and became infested, bugs sprung from nothing and lived in died and ruined in seconds, concrete cracked and crumbled, the ceiling caved in around them, metal twisted and rusted and groaned and through it all the scream continued. Continuous and undulating and all consuming.

The old man was dragged across the floor by an invisible hand and was laid prone on the ground at Beelzebub’s feet. His bleeding eyes were forced open. The scream did not stop but Beelzebub’s voice thundered from all around. “Ruin,” she said, “ruin, ruin, ruin-” a chant as steady as the buzzing and the scream. Beelzebub unfurled her mighty wings. The old man’s eyes were burned away upon the sight. Wings like these were not meant for earthly eyes. Even the ignorance through which they saw everything could not protect them from such incredible sights. The other men by the door were forced to their knees and there they waited, screaming, even with their eyes slammed shut and hands up over their faces their eyes began to burn.

Michael peeked out from the protection of her wings. She had not seen Beelzebub’s wings since before the Fall.

They were...not as they once were. The thousand eyes had been replaced by hundreds of thousands. Her Sight, dear god, Michael thought, her Sight. The ruined and blind compound eyes of flies glittered like a mosaic all around Beelzebub. Her wings were wrath and malice and power and corruption. They were ruin. They were decay. They were such unbelievable power. They burned but without fire. They were cold but clean and untouchable like glacier ice. They were the invariable march of time towards death. They were dark like the empty void of space and beautiful. Michael was awed into wonder. They were so, so beautiful. 

“ruin, ruin, ruin, ruin-”

The man at Beelzebub’s feet writhed and screamed and begged even as his skin wasted away and muscles and tendons shriveled and dried out like meat left too long to cook. His bones snapped. Bugs feasted on him. Like the building around them he went through a thousand years of suffering in only moments until he was finally silent and rotted away.

Beelzebub rose from the floor, floating upward until she was halfway to where the ceiling had once been, but now was only open air and the black and thunderous storm above.

The men who had so willingly followed the old man now begged and sobbed. One by one they suffered. Each in their own elaborate and torturous ways, until none remained.

Michael stood, still wrapped in her wings. Wind howled. Beelzebub scream was unending. Her voice boomed like the thunder above. Michael’s hair whipped out from its pins and flew around her head. She raised an arm to push it back and took a step closer to Beelzebub.

“Beelzebub!” she called.

Beelzebub rose higher. Her arms outstretched. Those blind wings grasping and reaching and spreading out into the air. That scream invading the land and the water and the very air. Michael felt the draw of Beelzebub’s power before it became reality. The scream changed. It became lower and more droning, it resonated with that static buzz.

From Beelzebub’s open maw a plague began to spread. Worse than those of Egypt so long ago. This could destroy the world. Beelzebub had the power to kill every last human on the Earth and then to crack the very planet like an egg. Michael knew she had that power.

Michael took a step closer. “Beelzebub, please!” she called but couldn’t even hear herself above the buzzing, the screaming, and the chant that went on and on and on- 

“ruin, ruin, ruin, ruin-”

Michael crouched and then rose up in one powerful burst from her wings.

“No!” she called and wrapped her arms around Beelzebub’s waist in a tackle. “Beelzebub, stop!”

They both fell to the ground and slid across the debris, but Beelzebub’s mouth remained open and from within her the power to kill the entire continent was still seeping. Michael gripped her shoulders and lifted before slamming her back down. “Stop! Stop it! Beelzebub!”

Michael threaded her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath. She wiped at the blood coating her chin and thought quickly and methodically. The paperwork would be horrendous if she didn’t stop this. She risked falling if she did not stop this. She had not been silent and unquestioning for six thousand years only to fall because Beelzebub’s wrath.

She leaned down and briefly ghosted fingertips across Beelzebub’s cheek before she placed her lips against Beelzebub’s.

It was a kiss, but it was also not a kiss at all. Beelzebub’s jaw loosened from its open maw and lips molded against each other as the scream cut off with an abruptness that left the world reeling. The force of her plague still poured out from her, but now it was not seeping into the human world, but into Michael instead. Michael was powerful, and exactly how powerful was an important factor in her thought process, because if she was not powerful enough to withstand Beelzebub’s plague then she would cease to be. Erased from this world the way a demon is destroyed by holy water.

It was a kiss, but it was also not a kiss at all. Michael allowed Beelzebub’s power, her essence, her being, to seep into her own and in return she poured herself into Beelzebub. Michael had not done such a thing since before the Fall. To share herself so freely was terrifying. 

The thundering chant ceased, as abruptly as the scream had.

Beelzebub’s plague began to falter. The wind all around began to fade as the storm above boomed out one last thunderous roar before it released the torrential downpour it had been holding. Michael and Beelzebub were soaked in seconds. Beelzebub shivered and her naked body curved towards Michael. One grasping hand grabbed at the tattered and bloodied lapel of Michael’s jacket. Beelzebub’s plague finally receded as the buzzing around the world faded and faded until softly it was gone. 

Where the building had stood all around them there was now ruins. No walls remained. There was only the cracked concrete of the parking lot to the left with rusted out trucks standing on rotten wheels. Rain turned to hail and Michael spread her wings above them both to protect them. Michael’s kiss turned gentler and gentler. She cupped Beelzebub’s face as Beelzebub’s wings shook and retreated.

“I have you,” Michael said as they parted. “I’ve got you. It will be alright.”

Siren sounds filled the air. Humans and their machines, Michael thought as red and blue streaked across the water soaked world. She glanced up at the advancing human vehicles and gathered Beelzebub up against her. She tucked Beelzebub’s head against her chest and smoothed down her rain soaked black hair. And then they were both gone.


End file.
